Companies, firms, and other organizations increasingly use document hosting systems to store, manage, and identify information (e.g., documents). In some instances, the organization operates the document hosting system on local servers. In other instances, a third party remotely operates the document hosting system on web servers that members of the organization access through the Internet. As organizations expand and produce more content, some document hosting systems store and retrieve an increasing amount of information. Over time, the information within a document hosting system can become a record of an organization's institutional knowledge and, the contents and metadata associated with that information come to identify organization members who are resources for a topic or project.
Conventional document hosting systems often provide folders that organization members can use to curate information within a structure, such as documents or user profiles within a folder hierarchy. For example, an organization's members may curate documents of a document hosting system by topic within a folder hierarchy. In conventional document hosting systems, folder hierarchies commonly comprise parent folders and subfolders that contain documents or other subfolders. As an organization's corpus of documents grows—and different organization members modify the information structure (e.g., folder hierarchy)—the information structure can become a multilayered labyrinth with multiple parent folders and subfolder upon subfolder. Additionally, curated information structures often limit (or organize by default) documents within one folder at the exclusion of another folder despite documents within one folder relating to documents in another folder (e.g., both documents containing similar content). Indeed, conventional document hosting systems often lack mechanisms to represent relationships among documents in different folders or among user profiles and other documents in different folders (e.g., showing how a user profile is connected to documents or folders).
The information structures of conventional document hosting systems can also slow or impede the process of searching for and identifying information. For example, a folder hierarchy of a conventional document hosting system may slow down a user from manually locating a document when the user must open multiple subfolders within a parent folder to locate the document. Additionally, a folder hierarchy of a conventional document hosting system may impede a user from locating a document when the folder hierarchy is organized by folders comprising counterintuitive topics or comprising folders representing overlapping topics. In the latter instance, a user may need to open and search through multiple parent folders and subfolders—sometimes finding nothing of interest—before searching through another branch of the folder hierarchy to locate a document or identify organization members that have written concerning a certain topic.
Beyond a conventional document hosting system's impediments to searching for and identifying information, a conventional document hosting system with a curated information structure can quickly become outdated or obsolete. For example, a folder hierarchy can be impractical to reorganize when a corpus of documents becomes too voluminous. Even when an organization member updates a conventional document hosting system's information structure by, for example, transferring and reorganizing documents within a new folder hierarchy—the structure can quickly become outdated as projects within the organization change or a team focuses on different subject matter. As a project changes direction or becomes independent from other projects, a corresponding folder hierarchy may no longer represent an organization's workflow or projects. The utility of a conventional information structure can be particularly short-lived—and the structure inhibit locating documents—in larger organizations with hundreds of members and projects.
Accordingly, conventional document hosting systems contain information structures and other limitations that prevent users from retrieving documents or using such documents to identify relevant information.